


cross

by ninemoons42



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Dreams, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, New York City, Qixi Festival, Tanabata, bridges
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-07
Updated: 2014-08-07
Packaged: 2018-02-12 04:37:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2096058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve, Bucky, and bridges, at several points in their lives - past, present, and future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cross

**Author's Note:**

  * For [keio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/keio/gifts).



> Fic has spoilers for both of the Captain America movies, as well as for the first season of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD.

"Did we really have to cross the bridge just to look at it?"

Steve Rogers huddles into his own jacket and into his best friend's piled on top of that, coarse material sitting heavily on his shoulders.

One by one the streetlights are going out, and little by little the last stars in the fading night sky become visible, just for a moment. Steve raises his hands, tries to span the stars in his fingers. He thinks he catches a glimpse of a hazy river of light, dividing those distant stars, and that's not really much different from where he's standing now.

Below, he can hear the quiet splash and croon of the East River. Soft waves washing the shore. 

"Come on, Steve, don't you trust me?"

Steve laughs softly, the sound of it muffled by his collars, and looks over.

Bucky Barnes is fumbling with a battered hipflask, cursing softly under his breath, and the last bits of starlight are falling into his mussed dark hair and into his intent eyes, and Steve feels something well up in his throat and hold his words fast. Something beautiful, something silent, something he can't explain. It is as if he has always been looking at his friend, as though they were standing on the opposite ends of a path, and he can't build a bridge between them.

In the next moment the top of the hipflask finally allows itself to be unscrewed, and Bucky hums and takes a quick sip of the contents before passing it over to Steve. Their fingertips meet on the metal, only slightly warmed by its stay in Bucky's pocket, and Steve shivers, gratefully touches the opening to his mouth. The coffee is cold and a little bitter, but it's good enough to wake him up.

After he swallows, Steve wipes his mouth with his sleeve and makes a face at Bucky. "You know you're a hard one to trust. All those pranks."

"But you trust me anyway," Bucky singsongs quietly.

"Yes, I do." He doesn't even hesitate. He does. He will. He can't explain why, but that's always been the truth between him and Bucky, from the first moment, with Steve on his knees and coughing up dirt and Bucky looking so sweetly concerned for him and volcanically beautiful in his rage against the boys who'd shoved Steve around.

Slowly the sky lightens. Slowly the stars fade away, and Steve feels a pang of regret as each point of brightness vanishes. Sunrise blush, and the rhythm of the waves, and then - he's looking at the Brooklyn Bridge, and the sky brightens into blue. A perfect summer's day.

"That's a sight."

Steve looks over.

From starlight to sunlight: Bucky's standing in a patch of pure brightness, and he's going away to Europe. To the war. Steve's heart lurches as he thinks of bullets and screaming and trenches and barbed wire.

"I wanted to see this with you," Bucky murmurs. "You know. Before - before. I might not be back for a while."

"But you'll be back," Steve says, through gritted teeth. "Or I'll come after you myself and bring you home and kick you across that damn bridge to boot." He has to force the words out. He has to force the smile onto his face. There's no laughing here. The words are a poor screen for his feelings. He can't tell Bucky to stay, and he doesn't want to tell Bucky to go.

"I'll ask you to kick me across the bridge when I get back anyway. Least I'd deserve."

Steve makes a sound that he only barely manages to choke off. It's not a sob, he thinks to himself, he's not crying.

Only, when Bucky takes his hand, the sunlight glitters off something wet and glistening on Bucky's knuckles, and Steve closes his eyes and clutches back and shakes.

***

Fire, and everything beneath his feet trembling, which is bad, because everything beneath Steve's feet is all that's keeping him alive and upright. Is all that's between him and a long fall to concrete.

Every few steps he has to shake his head; he has to clear the shocked sparks away from his vision. Too many things have happened to him in the past hour. The euphoria of seeing Bucky again and lifting him up from that bed with its ominous straps. The pure heart-shattering shock of intuition, because he knows what it means when a man shivers and repeats his name and rank and serial number, because he knows what those bruises and half-healed wounds on Bucky's body mean. The fear and the rage of the fight with - whatever Schmidt was and whatever he has got planned. 

Steve winces as he takes in another breath of acrid smoke.

Bucky is still frighteningly almost-silent next to him, and the next series of explosions - one almost directly beneath them! - doesn't even elicit a curse. 

Something shrieks on the other side - metal giving way - there's no place to go.

The nearest support beams shiver and sway, ominously.

"We have to find a way across." And Bucky sounds so horrifically calm. The hellish firelight throws shadows and ash into his sunken features. No emotions in his voice. 

Steve has to clench his jaw and swallow before replying. "I'll watch your back," he offers, hoping he sounds confident and reassuring.

He boosts Bucky over the railings, and there is everything and nothing familiar about the weight of Bucky's body, and Steve's mind is still whirling, because he's fairly sure he found Bucky in some kind of holding room for some kind of laboratory. Because he's fairly sure that the bed that Bucky had been strapped into was itself screwed down into the floor, or something. Someone had taken pains to make sure Bucky wasn't going anywhere, wasn't going to be able to get up and walk away.

Steve shudders and hopes Bucky keeps looking at his own feet as he crosses the girder, because Steve doesn't want his friend to see the naked fear that Steve's feeling.

Bucky makes it and the facility is on its last legs. Steve looks around. Fire and things shaking apart. 

Bucky must see what he's seeing, because he screams something about a rope.

Steve shakes his head, yells, does his damnedest to make the words into an order: "Just go! Get out of here!"

Bucky's face, across the gap between them and the bridge that is not really a bridge, goes dark for a moment. Something strange and furious and unnatural flits across those eyes. 

Steve bites back his fears - fear of this kind of death, fear of what's been done to his best friend - and shakes his head again. 

And then Bucky screams: "NO! _Not without you!_ "

The girder screams, as well, tortured metal finally giving way, and tears itself apart. Steve doesn't hear the pieces hit. His heart is beating too quickly and too loudly in his ears.

Reluctantly he tears his gaze away from Bucky's face. He has to. Backing away, losing sight of Bucky wreathed in hellish flame, and Steve shakes his head, almost crosses himself, before running, before launching himself into the air, leaping for Bucky, who's waiting for him on the other side - 

***

Bridges, Steve thinks, always bridges, when he thinks of Bucky.

He dreams, again and again, of a river of stars and a bridge of bird wings.

Sometimes he faces Bucky (or the Winter Soldier) across that strange and ephemeral bridge, and sometimes he fights that man back and forth and neither of them can land a real blow on the other, and sometimes they're standing side by side and watching as the bridge comes together or falls apart.

He emails Sam about his dreams.

_I think I might have heard something like that before, some kind of legend? Or it's just that your subconscious is throwing familiar images back at you to help you process what's going on. I'm no shrink._

_You're almost one._

_I listen, I don't analyze. That's for the experts._

Steve thanks him, and asks Bruce and Natasha for advice instead.

The answer, however, comes from neither of them. It's the chime that Steve wakes up to a few days later. An unknown email address, but the very first thing in the message field itself is a SHIELD authorization and identification code that Steve last saw just after fighting the Chitauri in New York. 

_Hello, Captain Rogers. We have not met personally, but I know you, and I know of you. I'm Agent Melinda May. I am currently assisting Director Phillip Coulson in his efforts to rebuild SHIELD._

There's a link embedded in the email, and Steve clicks on it to find a dossier and a photograph. Stern features. The file notes that Agent May's in-house nickname is - was - "The Cavalry", and that's what Steve recognizes. He's seen her handiwork before.

 _Pleased to meet you, Agent May. How may I help you?_ he sends, to be polite. He's more than confused, because he doesn't know how Director Coulson managed to get looped in to the question he sent the others.

 _Agent Romanova spoke to Agent Barton, who in turn forwarded your concern to Director Coulson. And he then asked me to help you. I know what your dream means, you see; it's a popular Asian tale._ She directs him to links for something called 七夕節 in Chinese and 七夕 in Japanese.

Steve reads up on the Qixi Festival and Tanabata respectively, and thinks back to the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn, with Bucky caught beneath starlight and the glow of the Milky Way, and thinks he understands.

He dreams of magpies.

***

The next time Steve finds Bucky, there's no fighting involved.

There's a bridge. The scent of pine and snow hangs heavy on the still, frost-laden air. They're so far up that Steve can just barely hear the roar of the river at the bottom of the canyon. The blue sky that arches between him at one end of the bridge and Bucky at the other is starting to darken and burn up in the first throes of sunset. The sun is falling towards the horizon.

Stars soon, Steve thinks, and puts his hands up. He starts walking.

Steve stops when he's almost halfway across the bridge. 

He holds one hand out.

Anything can happen now. He's out here in the open and the man on the other side has both his shield - the paint almost completely scratched off - and not a few guns. 

Steve could get shot, could get that shield thrown at him, could get attacked in some other way. The bridge could be collapsed beneath him, and send him plummeting down hundreds of feet. 

Anything. Everything.

But he's here, and he's patient, and he doesn't stop looking at Bucky.

Who takes a step forward, tentative, poised to flee at any moment.

Steve stands on his side of the bridge, and waits, and prays that they might meet halfway.

**Author's Note:**

> This piece was written around the time of, and for, the first festivities marking [Tanabata](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanabata), traditionally 7 July. This Japanese star festival originates from the Chinese observation of the Qixi Festival.
> 
> This year, the main feast events for Tanabata and the Qixi Festival took place on 2 August, so we're actually just a few days late to the party, but then again, Steve and Bucky have been a little busy.
> 
> K and I are very grateful (and in tears) for [this graphic set](http://theheirsofdurin.tumblr.com/post/92662936388/steve-bucky-bridges-the-pattern-pointed-out) by **theheirsofdurin**.
> 
> \-----
> 
> I am also on [tumblr](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/).


End file.
